With Gas Explosion in Her District, City Council’s New Speaker Is at Center Stage

Melissa Mark-Viverito, Council speaker, and Councilman Jumaane Williams at the site of two collapsed buildings in East Harlem. The speaker's office is a block away.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

By midafternoon on Thursday, Melissa Mark-Viverito’s eyes were smarting, her clothes rank with the smell of smoke. But her day was not over. There were more grim conversations to have with the medical examiner’s office, and a prayer circle organized by local pastors to attend.

Ms. Mark-Viverito has been the City Council member from East Harlem since 2006, and the Council’s speaker — the second most powerful elected official in New York City — since Jan. 8. But she has never faced a challenge like this.

“I’m tired,” she said at one point to her chief of staff. Then she shrugged it off and pushed on with her tasks.

The deadly explosion at two buildings on Park Avenue at 116th Street on Wednesday morning was by far the worst disaster in East Harlem since Ms. Mark-Viverito, a native of Puerto Rico, entered New York City politics a decade ago. Suddenly, a woman still barely recognized outside her district was at center stage, holding forth alongside Mayor Bill de Blasio at televised news conferences, seamlessly shifting between fluent Spanish and English.

Indeed, her prominence in coverage of the explosion — she stood stonily in nearly every photograph of the mayor, it seemed — was a coming-out moment of sorts for the city’s Hispanic community. “Can I just say how refreshing it is to hear a native Spanish speaker give crucial info?” posted Carolina Gonzalez, a writer, on Twitter.

Ms. Mark-Viverito also made clear her concern for the plight of immigrants in particular. At a City Hall news conference, she said a city executive order barred emergency workers from questioning people about their immigration status. Even so, she urged any who were affected by the disaster who did not feel comfortable calling 311 to call her office.

But it was on her home turf that she was most effective, and most affected.

She turned her district office, a stone’s throw from the explosion site, into a temporary headquarters and canteen for emergency workers, who came and went all day and night. She toured the scene repeatedly, gaping at a car crushed by falling bricks. She dropped in on a Red Cross shelter to check on evacuated residents and pressed a city housing official on when they would be allowed to return home.

Her staff contacted local landlords, seeking homes for the people whose apartments had been destroyed.

A woman whose son-in-law was missing asked Ms. Mark-Viverito in Spanish for advice about where her daughter could get counseling when the ultimate news came.

An editor at El Diario La Prensa, who had interviewed Ms. Mark-Viverito just days before, lived in one of the buildings. Her husband was missing. Ms. Mark-Viverito and a new aide, Erica Gonzalez, a former executive editor of El Diario, waited anxiously for word.

After speaking with someone from the medical examiner’s office, Ms. Mark-Viverito told Ms. Gonzalez that there was no update.

“They’re saying that they’ve only identified the first three,” she said. “The others have not been identified.”

Ms. Mark-Viverito had been in motion since the instant she learned about the explosion, shortly after 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, when a constituent who lives near the site posted about it on Twitter. She was headed to City Hall but turned her car around and raced back uptown.

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She said she imagined the buildings as vacant, and did not grasp that they were inhabited — buildings she in fact knew well.

“When one of the N.Y.P.D. guys came up and was explaining to me, and I was putting together — and he showed me the photo,” she said, “I started crying a little, to be honest, because it was a little overwhelming.”

As Ms. Mark-Viverito toured the site early on Thursday with the mayor and fire officials, the wreckage was still smoldering and the smoke was intense.

When she returned hours later, the air was clearer, the sun brightening the devastating scene.

Watching a forklift lift pieces of wreckage and put it in a trash-hauling bin, she asked a deputy housing commissioner, Vito Mustaciuolo, how they sifted it for remains.

“These machines take the debris — I’m sorry,” he said, pausing. “I keep calling it that, but I don’t know what else to call it.”

He explained that the Police and Fire Departments were sifting it, and using dogs to search, as well. Afterward, they would take the material to Randalls Island, where it would be sifted once more.

All day, she took questions from a string of interviewers, patiently shooting down speculation about the possible causes.

A cluster of reporters descended on Ms. Mark-Viverito as she tried to get into her S.U.V., pressing her about reports of a smell of gas in the days before the explosion.

She repeated what she and the mayor had been saying all along — that neither the city nor Con Edison had received any such reports before Wednesday.

“The way that our government can be effective is that we need to cooperate,” she added. “If people at any point feel uncomfortable, if people at any point smell something, they’ve got to report it.”

Getting into the car, she sighed with frustration.

“It’s hard, it’s hard,” she said, in a quiet voice. “It’s not like you want to blame anybody, but you have to say, ‘Look, if you smell something, you’ve got to report it.’ ”

“It’s a big city,” she went on. “We can’t —”

She drove off, the sentence incomplete.

A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2014, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: With Gas Explosion in Her District, City Council’s New Speaker Is on Center Stage. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe